Yair Spitzer, SensioLabs UK

Yair Spitzer is the CEO of the Inviqa Group, which represents SensioLabs in United Kingdom.

Interview recorded on June 8th 2012 during Symfony Live Paris conference.

Would you please introduce yourself briefly?

I’m the CEO of the Inviqa group. In the group we have three companies based in UK, focused on PHP : everything we do is PHP, nothing else but PHP! And SensioLabs UK is the last member of the family.
We started in UK five years ago and we are now already 80 people in our group. The services we provide are all around PHP with application development, training, consultancy, and support. We are continually looking for more services, products and technologies around PHP to satisfy everyone. Then we can offer a better service.

What industries are you targeting?

We focus predominantly on large enterprises. We don’t deal with small companies which just want to build quick websites. Our background is mainly large enterprises.
At the moment the customers with whom we are engaged on the PHP front are large companies like BBC, Channel 5, William Peel, IBC Media (huge publishing company)... The market sectors we actually deal with are broadcasting, entertainment, gambling, and media. We don’t do anything in franchise, services or banking which is an area where Open Source is not very strong. Our focus is mainly Open Source so we engage with customers who have decided to adopt Open Source.

“Large companies” means large websites or applications, doesn't it?

Yes indeed. For example, we've built websites for the BBC and especially the player. With gambling companies, it was a gambling website obviously! With Comic Relief, which is one of the largest charities in UK, we have built their complete fundraising platform.
So we build large scale mission for critical systems in general. It demands big teams with project managers, front end developers, back in developers, testers, creative... There are large projects, large systems.
So we need using tools that are scalable, powerful and secure. And that's obviously why for example we started to use Symfony!

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